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Government Surveillance on Chinese vs US made phones (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Question that I've been mulling over recently: My threat model dictates that I'm more likely to be surveilled by the US government than by the Chinese government. We can also assume that the Chinese government is not going to cooperate with the US government in any investigations of potential activist activity.

Would it not be best, then, to use a Chinese-made phone that, even though we know that information is going to China, we can also assume that any backdoors in the system are unknown to the US Gov?

I'm interested in everyone's take on this.

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[–] 13 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I use Google Pixel 9a with GrapheneOS installed and as far as I know, this phone does not have any known hardware backdoors/exploits, though that might be just because I enabled every possible security option in the Privacy and Security tab of the GrapheneOS' settings.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago* (2 children)

    If they had hardware backdoors we wouldn't know about them. In the end, with closed-source hardware, drivers and firmware, there's a lot we just don't know about what our devices are doing.

    But as a Canadian I consider the USA to be a more immediate threat than China. I'm trying to extract myself from depending on US technology bit by bit, as far as possible.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    Aren't both pretty imminent in Canada? I seem to recall something about China operating a secret police in Canada to keep Chinese people in line. A Chinese backdoor wouldn't affect you personally, but if you have a conversation with a Chinese person that's critical of the CCP, a Chinese backdoor in your phone COULD affect them.

    I guess something like GrapheneOS would work best. I hear they're partnering with some manufacturer to get rid of the Pixel requirement. Very much intrigued personally. I'm still happy with my aging iPhone and don't have a threat model to be super concerned about state level actors, but if push comes to shove, I'm getting either GrapheneOS, or a de-googled Android ROM on a Fairphone at the very least.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    I agree. China's tech is still a risk, and GrapheneOS is the best option right now though Google seem to be working hard to undermine it and other custom Androids. If Linux phones can get up to speed and do away with the need for the Android base, and especially if they can run on more open hardware, that could be even better.

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